“Picasso was always painting Dora Maar or whoever; Francis Bacon’s portraits could always be traced to some existing person. But not my portraits. They were all imaginary.”
—George Condo
Measuring more than six feet in height and width, George Condo’s Stepmonk’s Diary, 1996, is a monumental example of the artist’s portraiture practice. Created the year after Condo returned to the United States following a decade long stay in Paris, the present work is a testament to Condo’s increasing interest in Picasso, the drawings of which he studied and collected during his time abroad. In the same manner that Picasso was known for pushing the boundaries of figurative painting, Condo’s ‘figures’ are often grotesque and cartoon-like, transcending the familiar and foreign, and reflecting a manipulation of art historical tradition.
The figure’s lack of facial features in Stepmonk’s Diary work within Condo’s framework of “artificial realism” – questioning the logic of our exterior world. A figure in a navy-blue shirt poses alone within a vast white empty sheet. An uncannily long neck extends upward, upon which sits an oblong egg-shaped head, a green ball resting on top. To the left and right are two wide frog-like eyes, staring intensely back at the viewer. Emerging from the artist’s memory and imagination, the figure appears more dreamlike than realistic, presenting the viewer with imagery akin to a human, but distinctly unrecognizable – we are both haunted and intrigued by the ‘Stepmonk’, if we assume the title to depict the figure.
Condo has described his style of painting as “psychological cubism” saying, “Picasso painted a violin from four different perspectives at one moment. I do the same with psychological states. Four of them can occur simultaneously. Like glimpsing a bus with one passenger howling over a joke they're hearing down the phone, someone else asleep, someone else crying – I'll put them all in one face."Just as Picasso was able to collapse multiple entities and states of being into one form, Condo’s ‘antipodal beings’, as he calls them, exemplify a similarly perverse art historical construction. Started in the late 1990s, these invented forms are characterized by their exaggerated facial features, meant to exist on the outskirts of society as indicated by their often-sparse settings. Conceptualized early in his practice, this style has come to define the artist’s career, solidifying him within the cannon of contemporary art.
“I wanted to capture the characters of these paintings at the extreme height of whatever moment they’re on—in that static moment of chaos—and to picture them as abstract compositions that are set in destitute places and isolated rooms.”
—George Condo
In constructing this liminal space, Condo’s work reflects a preoccupation with the traditions of classical portraiture proposed by the Old Masters, while subverting it, aligning with artists such as Wasily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso and Caravaggio. Condo is noted as being directly inspired by these artists, as each of them “created their own language which was somehow comprised of everything that came before them and took it to a new level.”With the bizarre, unnerving characters which dominate his imagination, such as the one depicted in Stepmonk’s Diary, Condo strikes a uniquely postmodern balance of power.